The present invention relates generally to networking systems and specifically to a system and method for reporting and correlating network faults for network fault management.
Telecommunications networks often consist of a large number of distinct components and sub-systems, referred to as managed entities, that require configuration and monitoring. The state of a particular managed entity often depends on, and is partially driven by, the states of other managed entities.
When each of the managed entities change state, they often have to notify a management system of the state change. The state change is communicated to the management system by a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) notification, for example. Since managed entities often depend on the state of other managed entities to determine their current state, a state change in one managed entity could cause state changes in tens of other managed entities, and could therefore trigger a cascade of tens or hundreds of notifications to the management system.
As a result, such a large number of notifications can potentially create a broadcast storm and flood the management system. In the case of an external management system, the communication channel between a node in the telecommunication network and management system can become severely congested due to the high number of notifications, thus reducing the overall throughput of the telecommunication network. Furthermore, a flood of notifications may cause one or more of the notifications to be dropped. In such a case, the management system will be unaware of the problems at the nodes corresponding to the dropped notifications.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to obviate or mitigate the above-mentioned disadvantages.